”When any one State in the American Union refuses obedience to the Confederation by which they have bound themselves, the rest have a natural right to compel them to obedience. Congress would probably exercise long patience before they would recur to force; but if the case ultimately required it, they would use that recurrence.” — i svar till frågor från Monsieur de Meusnier den 24 januari 1786

Året senare skrev han: ”It has been so often said, as to be generally believed, that Congress have no power by the Confederation to enforce anything; for example, contributions of money. It was not necessary to give them that power expressly; they have it by the law of nature. When two parties make a compact, there results to each a power of compelling the other to execute it. Compulsion was never easy as in our case, where a single frigate would soon levy on the commerce of any State the deficiency of its contributions; nor more safe than in the hands of Congress, which has always shown that it would wait, as it ought to do, to the last extremities, before it would execute any of its powers which are disagreeable.” — brev till Edward Carrington den 4 augusti 1787

”The “weak-union” view was most famously espoused by James Madison. According to it, the Articles of Confederation did indeed acknowledge the separate sovereignty of the American states—and that was exactly the problem. Alexander Hamilton put it well in a sentence which is the theme of the entire Federalist: ”The great and radical vice in the construction of the existing Confederation is in the principle of LEGISLATION for STATES or GOVERNMENTS, in their CORPORATE or COLLECTIVE CAPACITIES, and as contradistinguished from the INDIVIDUALS of which they consist.” The new Constitution would solve this problem by creating a new kind of government—one of “divided sovereignty,” partly national and partly federal, in which all of the people of America would vest the national government with a part–limited and enumerated—of their sovereignty. The national sovereignty would therefore be totally seperate from the sovereignty of the states. This is why Madison insisted that the Constitution be ratified, not by state legislatures, but by special ratification conventions: to make clear that the states were not parties to the Constitution—thus it would “be then a government established by the thirteen States of America, not through the intervention of the Legislatures, but by the people at large…[a] distinction…[which] is very material.” Thus, contrary to the strong-union view, the sovereignty of the states did not depend on the creation of the federal authority; they were two wholly independent systems, in which the federal power was supreme within its limited sphere—and nonexistent outside of that sphere.”

”People would be shocked if the president of the United States said: “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough speeches,” or “you’ve given enough sermons” or “you’ve authored enough books.” Virtually all Americans would protest such remarks and boldly assert that it’s a free country, so they can say, preach or write whatever they please.

Yet the president can get away with saying: “I do think at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.” And he can get away with seizing and redistributing our money in order to “spread the wealth around,” with only a minority shouting in disbelief at the outrage. These dissenting voices have been unable to stop a century-long growth of the welfare state.”[…]

”Are these attacks on our possessions accepted because the right to property is a lesser right, one that isn’t inalienable like the others?

In his article “Property,” Madison emphatically says no. He explains that our right to property is as untouchable as our freedom of speech, press, religion and conscience. In fact, he views the concept of property as fundamental, pertaining to much more than merely our material possessions.

In the narrow sense, Madison says, “A man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.” But in a wider sense, “A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them … in his religious beliefs … in the safety and liberty of his person … in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. He then concludes: “[A]s a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.””

”All power in human hands is liable to be abused. In Governmts. independent of the people, the rights & interests of the whole may be sacrificed to the views of the Governmt. In Republics, where the people govern themselves, and where of course the majority Govern, a danger to the minority, arises from opportunities tempting a sacrifice of their rights to the interests real or supposed of the Majority. No form of Govt. therefore can be a perfect guard agst. the abuse of Power. The recommendation of the Republican form is that the danger of abuse is less than in any other; and the superior recommendation of the federo-Republican system is, that whilst it provides more effectually against external danger, it involves a greater security to the minority against the hasty formation of oppressive majorities.” — I ett brev till Thomas Ritchie den 18 december 1825

”There are, moreover, two considerations particularly applicable to the federal system of America, which place that system in a very interesting point of view. First. In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself. Second. It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable.” — Federalist Papers, no. 51

”The assault is being described as an act of war against America, and it is. But unlike the Pentagon, the World Trade Center had no military significance. Unlike the White House—which the fourth, unsuccessful plane had apparently targeted—it had no political significance for U.S. policy in the Middle East, or anywhere else. The attack on the twin towers cannot be seen as an effort, even a twisted effort, to redress the grievances of people who feel dispossessed. It was an act of sheer destruction, for the sake of destruction.” […]

”The terrorist leaders claim to speak for Palestinians. But the grievances of that people, even if legitimate, cannot explain the motivation for this act, much less justify it. The terrorists claim to speak for the victims of Western imperialism. But any literal imperialism is a thing of the past, long since redressed by the wealth that Europe and America have showered on these countries. It is clearly not the military or political power but the cultural power of the West that they resent.

What makes them denounce America as the great Satan is nothing as superficial as Coca-Cola or blue jeans. It is our secular culture of freedom, reason, and the pursuit of happiness. They hate our individualism; what they want is an authoritarian society where thought and behavior are controlled by true believers. They hate capitalism as a system of trade, production, innovation, and progress; what they want is a return to a primitive mode of existence from which these ”materialist” aspirations have been banished. They hate the political system of individual rights, the rule of law, and secular government; what they want is a tribal society ruled by command.”

”The clash-of-civilizations school doubtless represents part of the truth of the matter. But it is not the whole truth, and not the fundamental truth. Its chief shortcoming is that it exaggerates the extent of agreement in outlook, values, ideas, and loyalties among people who share the common history and culture that define a civilization. In fact, there are as many battles over these issues within civilizations as between them—especially in the case of the West.

Huntington views the West as a continuous, ongoing civilization over the past millennium. In his view, both the classical legacy of Greece and Rome and the Christian religion were and still are essential parts of our civilization, with modernization as simply the most recent phase. ”The West was the West long before it was modern,” says Huntington. ”The central characteristics of the West, those which distinguish it from other civilizations, antedate the modernization of the West.” At the level of fundamental philosophical principles, however, the Enlightenment period was much more important as a turning point in the West, and in a way created a new civilization.

Modernity was born in the West in a radical transformation of its past. The world of the Middle Ages, built around Christian Scholasticism world-view, was a society of religious philosophy, feudal law, and an agricultural economy. Out of this soil, the Renaissance and Enlightenment produced a substantially new society of science, individualism, and industrial capitalism. When we examine the wider context of Islamic terrorism, it is clear that a hatred of modernity is its driving force.”[…]

”It is therefore misleading to call our civilization Christian, even though that remains the largest religion in terms of adherents. The West may still be a culture of Christians, by and large, but it is not a Christian culture anymore. It is a secular culture. And that is what the Islamists hate most about us.

The al-Qaeda hijackers did not target the Vatican, the capital of Western Christianity whose leaders launched the Crusades. They did not attack the British Foreign Office, which directed colonial policy in the Middle East after World War I. They attacked the World Trade Center, the proud symbol of engineering audacity and global commerce, where businesses from scores of countries (including many Muslim countries) worked in freedom and peace, creating wealth and investing in material progress. Their target, in short, was a temple of modernity. Similarly, Hamas’s suicide bombers usually attack Israeli pizza parlors, hotels, and nightclubs, not synagogues.”[…]

”Anti-modernism is not unique to the Islamic world. On the contrary, it arose in the West in the middle of the eighteenth century, just as the Enlightenment was coming to full flower. Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that feeling, not reason, is the essential human capacity and civilization the chief cause of human woe. Since we cannot return to our former innocence, people should be forced to submerge their individuality in collective life. Rousseau’s ideas were a source of inspiration for the French Revolution, especially the Terror, and have shaped the thinking of subsequent collectivist theorists.

Anti-modernism flourished in myriad forms throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Romantic movement elevated feeling over reason and ”unspoiled” nature over the new industrial economy. Socialists wanted to restore a communal society, as did many conservatives. Religious revivals swept through Europe and America periodically. And everyone—aristocrats, bohemians, and philosophers alike—denounced the bourgeoisie as selfish money-grubbers. Anti-modernists laid the intellectual and cultural ground for the rise of totalitarian societies in the twentieth century. Today, the predominant forms are postmodernism among the intellectuals, who attack reason, individualism, and capitalism as Western aberrations; and fundamentalist movements in religion, which have been on the rise for the past quarter century among Christians and Jews as well as Muslims.”